Souvenir of Kiev

Description

Souvenir of Kiev is an early 20th-century album of 25 views of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine and at that time one of the most important cities of the Russian Empire. Among the sites shown are cathedrals, monasteries, monuments, educational and cultural institutions, squares, thoroughfares, the railroad station, bridges across the Dnieper River, and buildings connected with the commercial life of the city. The views in the album are collotypes, made using a chemically-based printing process that was widely employed before the invention of offset lithography. The captions on each collotype are in Russian, French, and German. Many of the period buildings shown were destroyed in World War II, making the album an important record of a vanished era in the history of the city.